This is yet another blog entry about Corporate America trying to do the right thing, but falling flat on its face.

Thud.

Teambuilding is one of those corporate buzzwords that invariably make its way into every employee survey and/or managers annual performance goals.

1. Build your team.
2. Create inclusion.
3. Make sure that when people come to work every day it’s a great big warm fuzzy.

First off: There is a reason they call it work and they pay you to do it. I only have to moderately tolerate the people I work with. We don’t have to be besties.

Second: Teambuilding can't be forced.  Yet, misguided managers across the land think that you can toss a bunch of people from two different locations who share like jobs into the same room for a few hours, feed them pizza and expect them all to “friend” each other on facebook. Sorry, not happening.

I was recently a victim of the forced teambuilding pizza lunch experiment.

P-A-I-N-F-U-L.

From the 3 hour long car ride down to the neutral location to the teambuilding exercise, to the pizza lunch, to the 3 hour long car ride back home.

Please baby Jesus – let it be over.

And then the pain was followed up with….wait for it….a survey to share our feelings.

Please kill me now.

Pass me a gun so I can shoot myself. And if you don’t have a gun, hurl a few bullets at me. Maybe one of the bullets will break the skin and I’ll die from a nasty infection.

A few bits of advice from an experienced “team member”; the following team building tactics don’t work:

1. The team lunch. I think I’ve sufficiently beaten this one into the ground.
2. “Guess who I am” surveys; participants answer questions about themselves and we all have to guess who it is. Because – gee, when 30 of the 35 people on our cross-location team list “Christmas” as their favorite holiday…that’s a dead giveaway to the identities of people I’ve never talked laid eyes on.  This also includes the ever popular “two truths and a lie” and let’s not forget the sugary sweet “guess the baby picture.”
3. Anything via conference call where the audio is crappy at best and the video shows a wide angle of a conference room. You can’t feel the teambuilding love when one can only hear every third word and the people on the other end look like ants.
4. Team Goals. These are made up initiatives usually at the department level to address some problem that really isn’t a problem, like lack of teambuilding. I’m not kidding here. There was an actual committee, which used real work hours to brainstorm solutions for turning two units into best friends forever. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

I appreciate the concept of trying to get these two team to mesh and gel. I do. This is not lost on me. I am not that heartless. But honest-to-pete; people have to get to know each other a little more organically. They need to be on projects together. Working together through a real project not a pretend project manufactured by the kumbaya fairy is how it should be done.

For the record, the team building committee did suggest that one team building option was to pair folks from different units on the same project. Management responded with how that was not "cost effective", but we can spend all kinds of time driving employees hither and yon for some forced teambuilding.

Head slap.

I guess I should be grateful there wasn’t a ropes course involved.

I might have been left swinging.